What's a Shut-In to Build? A Robot

Jennifer Marcus, ensconced in the messy fortress of her bedroom, clicking away at the keyboard and refusing to take out the garbage, is a suburban mom's worst nightmare, for sure. But the feisty heroine of "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow," a new play by Rolin Jones, isn't beaming instant messages to her girlfriends, retailing gossip about boys or news of shoe sales. She's swapping technospeak with rocket scientists, hellbent on creating her very own android.

This boldly imagined, even far-fetched notion provides the dramatic impetus for Mr. Jones's fanciful comedy, which has been staged with playful affection by Jackson Gay. The glaring topicality of the title is a little misleading. The play, which opened last night at the Atlantic Theater Company, does not concern itself with the possibility of divine intervention in the course of human evolution. The intelligent design is Jennifer's scheme to whip up that robot, who will be dubbed Jenny Chow and will venture where her homebound creator cannot.

Jennifer, you see, is a Generation-Y (or is it Z?) model of that familiar type, the troubled genius. She sticks to her bedroom because she can't step outside the front door. Sometime in high school, a garden-variety obsessive-compulsive disorder morphed into a wicked case of agoraphobia. Now Jennifer's only contacts with live human beings are hissing confrontations with her irritable, overworked mom, idle exchanges with her pleasantly passive dad and occasional visits from the pizza-delivery guy, who is also her quasiboyfriend.

Mr. Jones unfolds his tale of pioneering science fueled by post-adolescent angst with pleasing agility. Although much of the play consists of e-mail exchanges improbably cast in dialogue form, "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow" possesses a brisk theatricality that attests to Mr. Jones's own assured design skills and his gift for capturing the voices of pleasingly curious characters. ("Um, so I got a job re-engineering obsolete missile components after I lost my job at the mall," Jennifer explains, deadpan, to one of her correspondents.)

Mr. Jones and Ms. Gay, in collaboration with the gifted set designer Takeshi Kata and lighting designer Tyler Micoleau, also conjure onstage a poetic vision of today's world that feels fresh and true, funny and mildly saddening. It's a place where intimacy between ardent e-mail correspondents proves more durable than the bonds between members of a family living under the same roof, and emotional distance is more easily bridged by technology than human interaction.

In the pursuit of her goal, Jennifer forges firm digital relationships with a rumpled Russian-born scientist, an aeronautics engineer and a Mormon missionary (all played with boisterous energy by the skilled caricaturist Remy Auberjonois). Her mother Adele (Linda Gehringer), meanwhile, insisting on communication of the old-fashioned verbal kind, drives Jennifer deeper into her own personal cybercocoon.

Jennifer's loneliness -- and perhaps her illness, too -- derives both from the brilliance that set her apart and a deeper sense of unbelonging tied to her origins. An adoptee, she's Chinese by birth, and her dogged attempts to fit the mold of California girlhood (she was even the school mascot for a while) masked a profound alienation. As she and her mother have gradually evolved into antagonists, Jennifer has become more curious about her birth mother. The Jenny Chow project is her ambitious attempt to pursue some answers.

Mr. Jones's natural ear for the layered patterns of speech (and the distinctive syntax of the e-mail) is notable and commendable. (Michael Cullen and Ryan King are terrific as Jennifer's contrastingly quirky father and friend, respectively.) But a play cannot succeed equally as a sci-fi adventure story and a comedy-drama about a fraying family trying to stitch itself back together.

As we take off into the heady realm of fantasy, with Jennifer's robot lumbering to life and evincing signs of complex intelligence, the play loses altitude on other fronts. A drama about a young woman's uneasy relationship with the real world naturally begins to seem hollow when reality itself is gleefully abandoned.

Ms. Gay's direction also tends to favor the play's whimsy over its pensive underpinnings. Julienne Hanzelka Kim's energetic performance as Jennifer certainly holds the attention, but she overplays the character's brash juvenility. A 22-year-old agoraphobe would surely be less perky and more complicated than the exhaustingly bouncy figure presented by Ms. Kim.

Bright and engaging as "Jenny Chow" often is, the emphasis on the superficial excitements of woolly yarn-spinning over the more nuanced pleasures of truth-telling is a disappointment. (The lovely score, by Matthew Suttor, is one of the few elements that whispers insistently of the humanity that is elsewhere slighted.) Mr. Jones, a newly hot young playwright whose career is now steaming along (he's on the staff of Showtime's "Weeds"), will surely soon learn that a flight of fancy, however bold, is never as rewarding as a journey through the challenging maze of real experience.